Digging Up the Truth: New book sheds light on long-buried facts behind
hundreds of unresolved, Jim Crow-era murders

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Esther Schrader | Read the full piece here

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Friend,

The manila folder was almost empty when it landed on the desk of law
school student Tara Dunn. Her assignment? To find the truth hidden in
what was missing.

Inside was a newspaper article and the name of a man whose life had
been cut short, a Black husband and father named Henry
"Peg" Gilbert. The article, from a Black-oriented
newspaper, reported that the prominent Troup County, Georgia, farmer
and community leader had died in jail in 1947, less than a week after
he was arrested on charges of aiding and abetting a fugitive.

The article reported little more. Except for this conclusion: that
Gilbert had died when he attacked the chief of police. The police
chief, it was reported, killed Gilbert in self-defense.

It took Dunn, then a student at Northeastern University School of Law
in Boston, more than two years to unravel the truth: Gilbert had been
taken from his farmhouse in the middle of the night, as Klansmen and
local authorities terrorized the Black community looking for a
fugitive being sought for the murder of a white man. In jail, where he
was thrown despite no evidence he had committed any crime,
Gilbert's skull had been crushed, his bones broken in half, his
body pocked by five shots from a gun. Those were the conclusions of an
FBI investigation conducted not long after Gilbert's death.

But like most investigations of Black deaths in that era, this one
went nowhere. Gilbert's children were left without a father and
his family was too terrified to look for answers. No one was held to
account for his death.

Gilbert's story is just one of the more than 925 unresolved
violent crimes against Black people investigated by the Civil Rights
and Restorative Justice Project
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(CRRJ) at Northeastern.

Now, some of those stories are compiled in a new book - By Hands
Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners
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- that relies on more than 25,000 documents collected by
students and the founders of the project, Northeastern Law Professor
Margaret Burnham
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and Melissa Nobles
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, then a political science professor and now chancellor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This month, Burnham is in Jackson, Mississippi, and Birmingham,
Alabama, to sign copies of her book, published in September.

"The narrative of violence in the Jim Crow era is not new to the
American public," Burnham said. "But what is unsettling in
what we have found is the ways in which violence contorted and
misshaped the law itself. We've been able to unearth all this
evidence that violence and disenfranchisement were mutually
reinforcing phenomena in [the] Jim Crow South. The disenfranchisement
meant that local and federal authorities had no responsibility to
Black citizens. They were responsible only to their electorate. And on
the other side of the coin, the violence was a way of enforcing the
disenfranchisement."

Restorative justice

Founded in 2007, the Northeastern project has created a vast database
of unsolved violence, torture, lynching and murder of Black citizens
across 11 states throughout the Deep South between 1932 and 1954.

Fueled by the work of students and professors from Northeastern and
beyond, the project centers on preserving the history of these cases
(Burnham estimates the number still to be investigated exceeds 1,000)
and to provide scholars with a critical resource of information on the
racial violence that pervaded the Jim Crow South.

Burnham, a renowned civil rights advocate, first fought for voting
rights in Mississippi during the violence-plagued summer of 1964. She
became the first Black female judge in Massachusetts and was appointed
by Nelson Mandela to help investigate human rights abuses in South
Africa.

Restorative justice has been Burnham's life's work.

READ MORE

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